2015 Legal Awards

Legal Awards 2015 M&A awards 41 LEGAL awards ~ Legal Consultancy of the Year - South Africa Afriwise is pioneering a new consulting model for Africa, designed to assist clients with advice that is genuinely tailored to situations and local environments in African countries, through collaboration between the best African experts. We spoke to them to find out more about their firm and how they deliver their truly specialised services for their clients. As African economic development continues apace, international and local law firms alike have been wrestling with the problem of how to best provide a comprehensive Africa-wide service. While firms’ strategies for cover- ing the region differ wildly, none of the traditional firms has managed to create a truly pan-African legal offering. Thanks to our unique delivery model of working with established local experts throughout the continent (which become part of our so-called Afriwise Community), Afriwise comes very close to a true pan-African legal offer- ing: we are able to put together tailored teams on each of its clients’ projects and transactions, throughout the African continent, to reflect the required skills and expertise, on-the-ground knowledge and local socio-cultur- al and language affinity. From our experience, conventional solutions often don’t work in African markets. There is a need for flexibility and creativity when tackling country specific challenges, which is why we have also chosen for an interdiscipli- nary approach. With Afriwise, we try to break free from silo thinking and take into account the different angles to a project or a transaction from the outset. Through our integrated process, we save both time and costs for our clients. One of our most distinguishing features is that we have a unique value proposition that strives to maximize efficiency for clients. Our delivery model provides clients more control over the team that advises them and we also strive to provide our clients more control over and value out of their consulting spend. We achieve this in a number of different ways. Firstly, clients don’t pay for multiple layers of seniority as is often the case in traditional professional services firms. We don’t incur the significant overhead costs, which characterize large traditional firms, and our fees don’t need to cater for so-called beach or down-time time of underutilised consultants. Furthermore, we guarantee our clients correct pricing, and clients benefit from our knowledge of local markets and pricing cultures. Throughout our process, we keep processes simple and ensure that the work is completed as efficiently as possible. We are also deeply committed to offer our clients innovative and flexible fee arrangements to provide predictable costs, reduce billing complexities and align the cost and value of our services. Client satisfaction is our most impor- tant measure for success, and we want to become our clients’ adviser of choice when they need advice in Africa. Looking ahead, we are currently developing an online platform to enable us to collaborate even more efficient- ly with our Afriwise Community members throughout the continent. This platform will also enable us to pick up trends in Africa and harness the collective intelligence of the African experts we work with throughout the continent around specific issues. Company: Afriwise Consult (Pty) Ltd Email: [email protected] Web Address: www.afriwise.com Address: 33 Ballyclare Drive, Ballywoods Office Park, Bryanston, 2191, Johannesburg, South Africa Telephone: +27 10 596 8516 Afriwise Consult